Plan of Work

Since a principal aim of this volume is to compare, and if necessary to contrast, the responses to loss of young children with those of adults, it is necessary to decide at which end of the age-range to start. Advantage lies, I believe, in starting with what we know of the responses of adults, and thence to work down the age-scale, first to the responses of adolescents and children and, finally, to those of children during their earliest years of life. The merit of proceeding thus is that we ensure that before considering the controversial issues of children's responses to loss our picture of the responses of adults is both accurate and comprehensive. This, fortunately, is now made possible thanks to several well-planned and systematic studies of adults having been completed during the past two decades.

With one or two notable exceptions these studies of adults' responses have been directed to losses due to death. Moreover, a great majority of the clinical reports, both of adults and of children, that implicate loss have also been concerned with losses due to death. For that reason the cause of the losses with which the greater part of this volume is concerned is also death. Paradoxically, it is only in regard to the young children whose responses provide the starting-point for this work that loss due to circumstances other than death is involved.

To some readers it may seem a pity to confine most of the discussion to the effects of loss due to the single cause of death, since a great number, probably a majority, of losses that occur in our society are due to causes other than death. Familiar examples are losses caused by divorce or desertion and also losses of a temporary kind which can be caused by a host of different circumstances and can be either long or short. There are, however, also advantages in restricting the study in this way. Even limiting ourselves to this single cause of loss entails considering the effects of an awesome array of variables that influenc